It was February 1975 and Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore who
looked 15 years old at best, typed line after line of code that
would become the software behind Microsoft, which would launch
two months later.

Gates, his business partner Paul Allen, and a Harvard math
student named Monte Davidoff spent two weeks in the school's
Aiken lab. Gates was particularly relentless, forgoing studying
for exams to build the software.

In the wee hours of the morning, Gates would sometimes fall
asleep at the terminal. "He'd be in the middle of a line of code
when he'd gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the
keyboard," Allen said. "After dozing an hour or two, he'd open
his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely
where he'd left off — a prodigious feat of concentration."

Newport defines deep work as "professional activities performed
in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your
cognitive capabilities to their limit, [which then] create new
value, improve your skill, and are hard to duplicate."

Newport also quotes Isaacson's 2014 book "The
Innovators" to bolster his point. "The one trait that
differentiated [Gates from Allen] was focus," Isaacson writes.
"Allen's mind would flit between many ideas and passions, but
Gates was a serial obsessor."

Newport argues that it's not as simple as equating hard work with
success. Rather it's about understanding how — more than ever in
the age of constant internet connectivity — perpetual
distractions threaten to limit our potential and minimize the
impact of our work.

You don't need to take it to Gates' level and regularly work
through the night at the office. A dedication to deep work
requires setting aside stretches of time each week (of say an
hour or two) when you work with urgency and your
concentration is not disrupted by anything, not even a brief
moment of daydreaming or getting up for a cup of coffee.

It's about being constantly aware of what work is considered
"shallow" and what is "deep," and ensuring that shallow work
doesn't overtake your schedule.

"A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it's not a
philosophical statement — it is instead a pragmatic recognition
that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable
things done," Newport writes. "Deep work is important, in
other words, not because distraction is evil, but because it
enabled Bill Gates to start a billion-dollar industry in less
than a semester."